IUCN Green List
The IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas is the global standard that recognizes areas with good governance, sound design and planning, effective management and demonstrable conservation outcomes. Using it as a guide from the start brings order to a protected area's work and turns monitoring evidence into management progress that others can recognize.
The Standard at a glance
- 1. Good governance
- Legitimacy and voice; transparency and accountability; governance vitality and capacity to respond adaptively.
- 2. Sound design and planning
- Identifying and understanding the site's values; designing for their long-term conservation; understanding threats and the social and economic context.
- 3. Effective management
- Long-term management strategy; management of ecological conditions, threats, access and resource use; law enforcement; measuring success.
- 4. Conservation outcomes
- Demonstrating the conservation of major natural values, associated ecosystem services and cultural values.
The path to the Green List
Preparation. The area reviews its situation with the GL-SAT self-assessment tool, organizes evidence and defines improvement actions. It can repeat this as many times as needed.
Application. The area makes a voluntary commitment by registering in COMPASS, the IUCN platform for the process, and submits initial evidence for five indicators.
Candidacy. The area provides evidence for all indicators and addresses the gaps. This includes a stakeholder consultation and a field visit by the Expert Assessment Group (EAGL). It can take months or years, up to a maximum of five.
Green List. The IUCN grants the certificate, valid for five years. From then on, the work focuses on maintaining and improving the status.
GL-SAT and COMPASS
GL-SAT (Green List Self-Assessment Tool) is the IUCN online tool that lets protected area teams review their situation against the Standard. It was presented with its pilot phase at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in October 2025.
The platform asks for baseline information about the area, such as its official name, its identifier in the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) and its IUCN management category, and guides the self-assessment of 54 indicators. When finished, it generates a report by component and criterion with strengths and areas for improvement, which serves as a baseline. The self-assessment is a learning tool; certification is obtained through the formal process in COMPASS.
What we did in Dzilam and Ría Lagartos
With technical support from Tech4Nature Mexico, the teams of the Dzilam State Reserve and the Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve built their worksheets, mapped and organized their evidence, and completed their GL-SAT self-assessment in September 2026. Each reserve now has a baseline and a roadmap of improvement actions, and the lessons were shared in an experience exchange that also included the Puuc Biocultural Reserve.
The experience was documented in the manual «Camino hacia la Lista Verde» (Road to the Green List, in Spanish) and in a worksheet that any protected area can download and adapt. Monitoring with BioScanner, the species inventory, the connectivity study and the interviews for the management program provide direct evidence for criteria 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and 3.7.
How to prepare your protected area
Build your worksheet: list each component, criterion and indicator of the Standard and note which documents or records could demonstrate it. Use the downloadable worksheet or template 6. P6
Map and organize your documents: decrees, management programs, minutes, monitoring reports and agreements. Prioritize those from the last five years and store them in folders by component, with clear names such as 2024_Biodiversity_Monitoring_Report.pdf.
Register in GL-SAT with the area's official name, its WDPA identifier and its management category, and answer the indicators based on the organized evidence.
Analyze the gaps and distinguish documentation gaps from those that require strengthening management. Prioritize according to conservation goals and the team's capacity.
Define improvement actions linked to each indicator, with a lead, timeline, resources and expected evidence, and repeat the self-assessment as you make progress.
When the area is ready, review the IUCN's current guidelines and begin the formal application in COMPASS.
Lesson learned
Many gaps are about documentation: the team already does the work, but it has not been recorded. Organizing evidence from the start makes management visible, preserves institutional memory across administrations and connects biodiversity monitoring with outcomes the IUCN recognizes.
How it connects to the five stages
- Stage 1. Aligning goals with needs and contexts: Criteria 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 (good governance).
- Stage 2. Co-design and deployment: Criteria 2.1, 2.3 and 2.4 (design and planning).
- Stage 3. Analyze with AI: Criteria 2.1 and 3.7 (site values and measuring success).
- Stage 4. Observe the territory: Criteria 2.2 and 3.4 (long-term design and threat management).
- Stage 5. Decide and sustain: Criteria 3.1, 3.7 and component 4 (management and outcomes).
Tools to get started
- Manual «Camino hacia la Lista Verde» (opens in a new tab) (Tech4Nature Mexico, 2026, PDF, in Spanish), a four-stage guide: worksheets, document organization, GL-SAT and gap analysis.
- Hoja de trabajo de la Lista Verde (opens in a new tab) (Tech4Nature Mexico, 2026, Excel, in Spanish), with indicators, evidence types and a list of reference documents.
- GL-SAT self-assessment tool (opens in a new tab) (IUCN), an online platform with registration.
- Estándar de la Lista Verde, versión 1.1 (opens in a new tab) (IUCN, in Spanish).
- Componentes y criterios del Estándar (opens in a new tab) (IUCN, in Spanish).
- How does the Green List work? (opens in a new tab) (IUCN), phases of the process.
- IUCN Green List User Manual, version 1.2 (opens in a new tab) (IUCN, 2019).
- COMPASS, the Green List platform (opens in a new tab) (IUCN).
Marine areas of the Coral Triangle
In the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, communities, marine protected area managers and governments are advancing toward the Green List through participatory self-assessments and GL-SAT. Nine of the twelve nominated pilot areas progressed in their self-assessment, and the region's six countries recommended recognizing GL-SAT as a complementary tool to assess the effectiveness of their regional system of marine protected areas.